There follows my translation of the Tass
statement of which I supplied you the Russian original with
my letter:

Red
Cross Agency.

The Names of 130,000 Oswiecim
prisoners Established.

"Moscow, September 21. /TASS/
The fate of people of many countries -- victims of
the Second World War -- is to be determined from
the personnel records of 130,000 prisoners cf
Oswiecim and the death lists of this concentration
camp. Because these papers have now turned up in
the Soviet archives. In 46 large file binders the
details were minutely recorded day by day. Death
records were filled in for over 74,000 people
giving their precise birthdate and parents' names
as well.

Tass correspondent Valentina
Fatyukhina reports on this. The head of the
Soviet Red Cross tracing service will according to
Valentina Fatyukhina hand over these records to
representatives of the International Red Cross. lt
had been known for some time that these records
were preserved in the Soviet Union -- in fact since
1964 when the trial of concentration camp guards
from this camp took place in Frankfurt am Main. A
Soviet representative produced several of these
files on that occasion. Valentina Fatyukhina
reports further that when Europe was liberated from
Fascism by the Soviet Army these documentary
materials ended up in the Soviet Union and landed
in various archives. This obviously impeded the
searoh for them.

Valentina Fatyukhina spared no
trouble in her search. She directed countless
inquiries and applications to official quarters.
But at that time many archives remained closed.
Only in the last eighteen months, as access to the
archives was permitted, were these records
uncovered. Nobody suspected the presence of 130,000
personnel cards in the archives. The International
Red Cross intends to exploit these records as
rapidly as possible."

SO
FAR only
The Spectator (Diary, 7 October) and the Evening Standard
have had the integrity to print what TASS, the Soviet
News Agency, reported on 21 September: that the Auschwitz
Death Books, just discovered in Moscow archives, reveal
that 74,000 people died in that camp. (The Evening
Standard pulled this report out of its later editions,
who knows under what pressure?)

As your
columnist points out, I commented to the newspaper: "It
is certainly good news that the death roll at Auschwitz
was nothing like as bad as has been feared." The figure
of 74,000 is, of course, bad enough: nearly twice as many
as died in the July 1943 RAF attack on
Hamburg.

Some
critics have reasoned that perhaps not all the Auschwitz
victims were formally registered. Working last week in
the archives of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research in
New York however, I came across, and photocopied, the
order from the overall head of the SS concentration camp
system directing that detailed records of Jewish deaths
were to be kept. Since Professor Arno Mayer of
Princeton, himself a Jew, has now concluded in a book
that most deaths in Auschwitz were from what he called
'natural causes', the murder figures may well be even
lower than 74,000.